Editorial from Bloomberg Opinion
The details of what went wrong in Texas last week — most likely the biggest forced blackout in U.S. history — will take time to establish. So will exactly what to do about it. But this emergency already underlines something that should’ve been obvious before and that applies to every state in the nation: The growing threat of extreme weather puts vital economic systems at risk and climate resilience needs to be taken much more seriously.
Evidently no one thing went wrong. The failure was systemic and multifaceted. The extreme cold shut down power from fossil fuel and nuclear plants when instruments and pipelines froze. As the problems cascaded through the state’s electricity grid, the outages unmasked a glaring deficiency: The system as a whole had not been weatherized to the necessary standard.
The failure also exposed shortfalls A relatively self-contained power grid limits the ability to draw power from elsewhere in emergencies. Lightly-regulated energy producers benefit consumers with cheap power. But the delayed cost of maintenance investments is what consumers are now having to endure.
Investing in resilience is a form of insurance. It costs money, and it’s reasonable to ask how much is enough. The cost of guarding against every conceivable climate extremity would be prohibitive, but that doesn’t excuse policymakers for simply turning a blind eye to infrequent yet recurring events that cause massive losses when they happen. And the trade-off gets worse with time.
Failing to act on climate change now means that extreme weather is likely to become much more frequent.
The right amount of spending on resilience — the ongoing cost of climate-change insurance — will keep getting bigger year by year until the underlying threat is adequately addressed. Texas’ failures are glaring at the moment. But it’s by no means the only place that’s gambling recklessly on “It will never happen.”
